A tear came out of my eye when I saw it. An instant glimpse to the past when I played Grim Fandango for the first time. Good job, guys! Keep up the good work! And the music is topnotch as well. "No woman, no cry" brought smile to my face. I am eager to see other "surprises" ther are. :)

From what I've seen, this is a little bit more than "heavily inspired by" Grim Fandango. Entire plot elements, characters, cutscenes, and even the game design itself are lifted practically whole from Grim. The ship captain? The mechanically-minded but stupid sidekick? I could go on and on.

Many people take a cookie cutter approach to creativity. It's safer, it's easier and it gets the job done. Plus, if people enjoyed the cookies the first time around, they'll usually enjoy them again. You can look to the movie industry, television, books and essentially all forms of entertainment for examples of this. Is it right? Is it fair? Not always; but it's not always a bad thing either. Many great works were inspired by other great works. It's kind of a cycle.

From what I've seen, this is a little bit more than "heavily inspired by" Grim Fandango. Entire plot elements, characters, cutscenes, and even the game design itself are lifted practically whole from Grim. The ship captain? The mechanically-minded but stupid sidekick? I could go on and on.

I haven't played GF myself, so I can't say this with total certainty, but when it comes to the creation of ideas, people naturally use the information they have in their minds to come up with things, meaning that everything they've seen and done before influences their artistic decisions. When it comes to this game, if they chose to focus their influences from a select group of games, the comparisons would obviously be easily noticable.

Again, I haven't played GF, so I'll have to leave the real comparisons to you and whomever else for the time being. But that said, I can't imagine these guys simply took the idea and made it look a little different. We also don't know the plan for their full story, so that portion really depends on how the remaining chapters turn out.

My first thought was the little pygmy doll with a huge knife that runs after people in Stephen King movies, known as "Forest/Jungle Fetish?" in Diablo II and has been depicted in Tales from The Crypt once

We've been inspired by a bucketload of different things when creating TJD and I'd probably say Monkey Island, GF and TaleSpin have been among the biggest sources of inspiration. So no doubts, you'll find elements from all of them in there! Though to be fair most ideas we snagged from TaleSpin, they snagged from *Tales of the Gold Monkey* who in turn probably got their ideas from some other previous work...

As for Borrowing ideas from GF, I'm certainly not going to pee on Grim Fandango, as it is one of my favorite games ever, but honestly, isn't chapter two of GF heavily inspired by "Casablanca"? Yes it is. And it doesn't make the game any less fun to play in any way, in my opinion. :)

Moose, I hope that you'll give the game a chance and find for yourself that it's far from being plagiarism. but rather a collection of nice elements, rolled up into one original game. :)

Thanks for all the comments, guys! I just love talking about TJD so please keep on ranting and I''ll do the same!